From the Preface to Eros the Bittersweet:
Kafka's "The Top" is a story about a philosopher who spends his spare time around children so he can grab their tops in spin. To catch a top still spinning makes him happy for a moment in his belief "that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things." Disgust follows delight almost at once and he throws down the top, walks away. Yet hope of understanding continues to fill him each time top-spinning preparations begin among the children: "as soon as the top began to spin and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand he felt nauseated."From "Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela" in Plainwater
The story is about the delight we take in metaphor. A meaning spins, remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal, and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent. What is the relation of impertinence to the hope of understanding? To delight?
The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Suppression of impertinence is not the lover's aim. Nor can I believe this philosopher really runs after understanding. Rather, he has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in order to furnish himself with pretexts for running after tops.
In the city of Burgos lies El Cid himself - beside Ximena he rests in an eternal conversation. Beneath the transept of Burgos Cathedral they have lain since 1921, and before that in a burial place in the city from the year 1835, and previously seven hundred years in the monastery of San Pedro outside the city walls. By now, she must know every word he is going to say. Yet she kisses his mouth and the eyes of his face, she kisses his hands, his truth, his marrow. What is the conversation of lovers? Compared with ordinary talk, it is as bread to stones. ...And back to Eros the Bittersweet:
There is no question I covet that conversation. There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of a bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you? You see what I fear.
From the testimony of lovers like Sokrates or Sappho we can construct what it would be like to live in a city of no desire. Both the philosopher and the poet find themselves describing Eros in an image of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the wind or a story. In a city without desire such flights are unimaginable. Wings are kept clipped. The known and unknown align themselves one behind the other so that, provided you are positioned at the proper angle, they seem to be one and the same. ... To reach for something else than the facts will carry you beyond this city and perhaps, as for Sokrates, beyond this world. It is a high-risk proposition, as Sokrates saw quite clearly, to reach for the difference between known and unknown. He thought the risk worthwhile, because he was in love with the wooing itself. And who is not?(I'm destroying the letter, and other similar letters; some things are beyond pardon.)